


What are friends, is this a family?

by imsfire



Series: Celebrate Rogue One characters 2018 [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Feels, Found Family, Friendship, Gen, Jyn is not good at emotions, Jyn is trying to sort out her feelings, Jyn-centric, Loyalty, New Beginnings, Post-Battle of Scarif, Purpose, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, comradeship, realising how much you care & not knowing how on earth to do this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 18:55:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14837288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: For week one, day one of Celebrate Rogue One; theme, Jyn and Family & friends.





	What are friends, is this a family?

**Author's Note:**

> For week one, day one of Celebrate Rogue One; theme, Jyn and Family & friends.

She doesn’t know what to do with it, this gentleness inside her.  It was never there before, she’d felt nothing like it in a decade.  But now, hearing Bodhi fight through an anxiety attack, she would rise up and battle it herself if it could help him.  

And yes, that’s normal in a way, she’s always been the one who fought, who hit back time after time and mistake after mistake.  But the urge to take his bunched-up, shaking fists and uncurl them, and warm them between her own, the urge to lead him somewhere quiet, find him a seat and a shelter, stand over him protectively; that is new, and confusing, she doesn’t understand it or where it came from.

Bodhi was the last person who had known her father.  He’s the only one who’s ever looked gladly to her as Galen’s kin, the only one who’s hoped to see her father’s character in her, instead of fearing it.  If she could ask for a brother in this life, she would ask it now, for him.

*

She hears a junior officer remark on the uselessness of keeping “that old blind man and his bloody minder” on the base; hears the medical staff who treated Baze and Chirrut after the battle sneered at for wasting resources on them.  Regrets again that she’s never had the power of words, to lash out with a stinging phrase, blister the skin of the mockers.  Tell them they know nothing, and the men they ridicule are fighters worth ten of them.

Wants to get the fools on a training mat and crack a few bones for them. 

Wants even more simply to be there the day Chirrut can walk again, and gets to do it for himself; the day Baze gets to watch and laugh.

*

She hovers in the doorway of one of the physio suites, at the end of her own session; sweating and aching, aware that her tired muscles are getting chilled now; but inside, just a few metres away, she can see Cassian with his eyes locked and grim, working his way along the parallel support bars.  He moves so slowly, every move, every careful shift of his hand an effort.  All his focus is grimly locked on the next step, and the next.  Her palms hurt with the tension, fists clenched and  finger nails biting in, as she watches him struggle and refuse to give up.

She thinks of how he fought through every moment of agony, to get back to her on the tower, and take the shot that saved her.

Of how they hurled hate and insults at one another; and then mere days later he laid his life in her hands, and brought her everything she needed, friends, allies, soldiers, hope.  How he opened the doors they had both slammed shut inside themselves, and offered her a chance, and the peace of trying, the blessing of going down fighting instead of in despair; and she would pour out all the strength left in her own limbs if it could help him now. 

How he cared.

How she cares, now.

*

Caring, opening, kindness in her heart; these would have killed her, once.  Have got her killed.  It will not come fast, or easy, to let go that knowledge.  The compassion she’s allowed out only for moments of quick action, to steal a bite of food for someone, or snatch a kid from the path of a grenade; slowly, as the days pass and trust is still possible and alive, she realises, she can let it be there, now, this kindness.  It can grow and bloom in her, she no longer has to hide it away.

Would her parents have had more children if the universe had treated them fairly?  Would they have had a larger family?  Have found a community, one day; would they have had friends, people who had no aims and no agenda but liking them?

Her father had hoped she might have a family.  Her mother used to smile and rumple her half-combed hair when she talked, happy ignorant child, of _When I grow up and I’m a mama too…_

She can have them now.  Friends.  Family.  Compassion, community, a life with trust and meaning.

She can have a small fraction of the life they would have wanted for her.  She can learn how to live it, she can take the time, get used to it, love it.  Love them.

It’s a beginning.


End file.
